MSN, and why they need to fucking die.

[WayAbvPar]

Well, I broke down and hit Best Buy last night- grabbed a CoH preorder box and an Xbox game (Fight Night 2004). Got my account set up and started the LONG download (almost 8 hours). I figured I would play CoH all weekend, so I wandered out to the living room and played Fight Night for a few hours (fun, but really goddamned hard).


Fast forward to this morning- My wife and I are moving, and I spent the better part of the this morning canceling services and ordering new ones for the new place (we take possession tomorrow). I call MSN to cancel my DSL (I can finally get cable! Woohoo!). During the conversation with the incompetent fuck, we discover that today is actually my billing date, so I can cancel today with no prorated charges or what have you. I go off on a tangent with the pimple, exploring my options so I can keep my email address for at least a couple of months.

We meander back to the cancellation, and I tell him that I need service through the end of the month (April). He hesitates, and asked me to hold. 3 minutes later he comes back on the phone, and tells me that he has already canceled my service, AND THAT THE PROCESS IS IRREVERSIBLE. He then hands me off to his supervisor, knowing full well that I am about to fucking freak out.

The supervisor explains that they can have my service back up in 10-14 days. What took his retarded chimp employee 5 seconds to do prematurely is irreversible. WTF?????????????????????????????????????????????

Can anyone explain this to me? It was partially my fault I guess, since I chose the cancelation option on the 800 line- but shouldn't there be some sort of safeguard against this? I cannot believe how fucking stupid this is.

In summary- I now have CoH ready to install, and NO FUCKING INTERNET ACCESS AT HOME FOR ANOTHER WEEK (at least). I had previously made an appointment with Comcast to set up my cable pipe for next Saturday (which is about the earliest I would have needed it, not knowing the depths of MSN's fucking incompetence). Looks like an X-Box week for me- and no online poker!

Fuck.

[Alluvian]

Wow... I feel for you man.  That sucks and is truly incomprehensible to me.  It just logically makes no fucking sense at all. Everything is obviously there to do, the only thing that makes any sense is that you are now at the bottom of a very large or slow moving queue.

I have never had a first come first serve que that could not be massaged or adjusted as the need arises though.  In a situation like this I would have made damn fucking sure to go outside of the 'proceedure' and get you on the top of the stack as soon as possible.  The alternative is pretty fucking awful word of mouth.  He chose fucking awful word of mouth, so spread the hate.  They deserve what is coming to them.

I suspect the supervisor does not know enough about the inner workings to understand that things can be moved if absolutely necessary.  As a grunt in these situations, letting superiors know about the ways to get around the system is a risk because then everything becomes a fucking exception.  But the man in charge has to know the REAL limitations.  And I doubt this is anything but an artificial one.  Grilling him may not have any success because he may have been told by the grunts that it can't be done.  I simply refuse to believe in the impossibility of it.  The grunt at the end of the line is almost certainly able to do this manually if provided with the right data.

I worked on both sides of billing in our department.  My boss was smart enough to know that you cant make a proceedure unless you understand the workings from the inside, and the one making the proceedure should be the one that has to live with it so that they don't make a SHITTY proceedure.  Because of that I spent 4 grueling fucking months doing billing related grunt work.  1 month prior to writing proceedure, 1 month waiting for the damn thing to get approved and 2 months living with the results so we could tweak it for the ones using it (which I was a part of at the time).  Suffice it to say, there is a way around EVERYTHING, but very few know about them so that you don't have chaos.

[Mr_PeaCH]

I'm sorta scratching my head about why you're talking with MS(N) about your DSL service.  Shouldn't you be talking with your phone company?  Am I missing something?

 - simpleminded cable subscriber

[WayAbvPar]

I'm sorta scratching my head about why you're talking with MS(N) about your DSL service.  Shouldn't you be talking with your phone company?  Am I missing something?

 - simpleminded cable subscriber

Qwest supplies the pipe (and does the billing), but MSN controls the service as my ISP. Not that it makes any sense, but that is how it is set up. Twice the incompetence for the same low price, I guess.

[daveNYC]

Do you know if there's a WiFi network in the area that you can leach off of?  That's what I do at home.

Purchase of a WiFi card assumed.

[Snowspinner]

I really hope you don't use the leached Wi-Fi for anything other than websurfing. I saw my internet speed slow to a crawl a few months ago. Called tech support, they insisted I was doing heavy traffic. Poked around, and lo and behold, some assholes were leaching my Wi-Fi and downloading pr0n.

[Shavnir]

If you've got a laptop there's http://www.paneras.com">places you can go to find free broadband...sometimes. :/

Edit Because I'm fucking retarted and forgot to enable HTML

[Rasputin]

So lemme get this straight, Snow...

you set up a wireless access point without any type of security?

You deserved what you got.

You're lucky it wasn't kiddie porn.

[SurfD]

Sorry snow, I gotta go with Rasputin on this one.  Unsecured WiFi networks DESERVE every bit of hell they get before they smarten up.

[HaemishM]

That is completely fucking retarded, Way, and I'm almost positive it's a bald-faced lie. How to catch them on it, however, is beyond me.

I mean shit, try to cancel an AOL subscription that you don't even dial up to, and you have to talk to Jesus, Josephy and Mary and you still get a free three months out of the deal. They do everything in their power to make sure that even though you said the words cancel that you really cannot cancel without having another few months free service. And it works, sometimes.

I'm just amazed that any company would want to make cancelling not only that easy, but that irreversible.

[taolurker]

At my last job, Haem, I worked for a local internet provider (that was rapidly moving toward voice over IP as well as providing DSL), and DSL is more of a loss depending on what the actual monthly charge is.

Likely with MSN going through Quest it's a double tiered sharing of bandwidth (possibly triple if the leased copper isn't even owned by Quest), and one that MSN loses money on. I could see them possibly wanting to retain bandwidth for that node at the expense of a customer who was cancelling anyway, but I highly doubt the irreversible part (which would be quite easy for the supervisor to fix- I used to all the time as a Level 2 tech).

My suggestion WayAb would be to call Quest directly, as they are the ones who will be responsible for allowing the DSL line to actually carry bandwidth. Likely the only thing you'd need to do would be change Networking Protocols. /shrug They may want you to pay what their charge is for a month or two of DSL, which is likely more than what MSN was charging.

added in edit

[Snowspinner]

Yes, I should have secured the network. /shrug

Doesn't make downloading porn on someone else's account right, any more than it's right to steal someone's purse if they're not keeping a good enough eye on it.

A lot of broadband services have bandwidth caps. Driving people above those caps by stealing their service is wrong.

[Fabricated]

I really hope you don't use the leached Wi-Fi for anything other than websurfing. I saw my internet speed slow to a crawl a few months ago. Called tech support, they insisted I was doing heavy traffic. Poked around, and lo and behold, some assholes were leaching my Wi-Fi and downloading pr0n.

Ahahahah. Wardrivers. Gotta love em'.

WEP won't keep dedicated connection thieves out, but it'll discourage a vast majority of the rest. Secure your access point.

[Rasputin]

Yes, I should have secured the network. /shrug

Doesn't make downloading porn on someone else's account right, any more than it's right to steal someone's purse if they're not keeping a good enough eye on it.

A lot of broadband services have bandwidth caps. Driving people above those caps by stealing their service is wrong.

I didn't say it wasn't wrong.

I said you were a retard and deserved what you got.

Rule 1: WEP.

Rule 2: MAC Address filtering.

I'm breaking my own rule 1 because I'm too cheap to buy an XBL wireless unit that speaks WEP. So I've got my wireless locked down by MAC.

Am I encrypted? No.

Am I preventing habitual pr0nsurfers from leeching my bandwidth? Yes.

You're still retarded.

[Snowspinner]

You're still retarded.

/shrug. I'm not that big of a computer techie. I can hook things up and follow directions. I can troubleshoot problems. I was having trouble getting the wireless network up and running, I called tech support, they walked me through it. They didn't include anything about setting up WEP in the walkthrough, and I didn't notice it.

Considering that, even with my lack of networking knowledge, I'm a more skilled user than 80-90% of the population, I'm thinking maybe, just maybe, the problem isn't so much that I'm a retard as that the technology isn't user-friendly enough for prime time.

[Azhrarn]

This reminded me of a rant a friend of mine posted a while ago about his experiences working Tier 3 tech support for MSN.  Apparently what he wrote pissed off quite a few higher ups (really higher up) a bit. :)

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,6252441~root=msnetwork~mode=flat

In short: "You'll be off the Internet for a week while the NOC circle-jerks on your account. Enjoy."

[daveNYC]

I really hope you don't use the leached Wi-Fi for anything other than websurfing. I saw my internet speed slow to a crawl a few months ago. Called tech support, they insisted I was doing heavy traffic. Poked around, and lo and behold, some assholes were leaching my Wi-Fi and downloading pr0n.

I am a considerate mooch.

[Snowspinner]

I really hope you don't use the leached Wi-Fi for anything other than websurfing. I saw my internet speed slow to a crawl a few months ago. Called tech support, they insisted I was doing heavy traffic. Poked around, and lo and behold, some assholes were leaching my Wi-Fi and downloading pr0n.

I am a considerate mooch.

OK. No problem with being a considerate mooch. Honestly, if it weren't for yonder porn-downloading assholes, I'd leave the network open. Happy to let people do basic webstuff on my nickel. Just not happy to have them choke my bandwidth.

[Shavnir]

Ironically enough where I live it was a choice between legit WiFi nodes with good speed or boondockians with their 56ks plugged into a Wireless router.

Needless to say there was much purchasing of fancy bread in sandwhich shops.

[WayAbvPar]

Two nuggets of wisdom from the DSLreports rant-

Q: Wow! Is it because he thinks I'm stupid?

A: Actually, most people who call MSN tech support are quite stupid; smart people don't use MSN.

Duly noted. I didn't have a choice at my current residence (they have reacharound contracts with all the service providers I am pretty sure), so it certainly wasn't what I hoped for.

Q: So, in total, is MSN a good ISP?

A: NO. By almost any standard, MSN is a horrible ISP.

A fucking men.

[HaemishM]

Q: So, in total, is MSN a good ISP?

A: NO. By almost any standard, MSN is a horrible ISP.

A fucking men.

Thankfully, I knew that before I ever read the rant. Of course, being in a place where I have a plethora of choices, I was never tempted to try MSN. It's amazing that Bellsouth has such a good DSL service, unless it breaks, at which point, you must talk to the biggest sacks-of-shit-liars in the free world sarcastically labeled "customer service."

[WayAbvPar]

So- is Comcast any better? At least the download speed is a shitton faster than my DSL...

On second thought, I am not sure I wanna know.

[Snowspinner]

Comcast has download limits, which if you surpass, they threaten to disconnect your service.

However, they refuse to say what these limits are. So it's impossible to know how much you have to reduce your usage by.

[schild]

Comcast in PG County Maryland has uncrapped speeds and download. I get about 500k down, 50k up, and download about 100 gigs a month.